After the conclusion of the WW2 Battle of Stalingrad, Nazi Party member and official photographer for the NSDAP, Holger Hildebrand, was captured by the Red Army at the Battle of Stalingrad. He and thousands of other Wehrmacht soldiers were later sent on a death march towards Siberia; this mammoth footage is understood to have been taken during that journey. (Hildebrand is believed to have died a prisoner of war at a Soviet forced labor camp in late 1945. His Granddaughter later came into possession of the footage when his belongings were repatriated to Germany from Russia decades after his death.)WeirdWildSpooky

About Craig WoolheaterCo-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.

You only have to slow that one up so much. OK, it’s either a mammoth or a convincing CGI representation of one.

Given the odd start and finish – that’s all the guy shot? – well I won’t call bull (and if you do, you have to prove it is). But I’m not holding my breath for the followup, particularly given the truncated history of the photographer and the film.

For only one thing: why would he have been allowed to keep and use his camera?

Read the Snopes stuff. Not sure they debunked it. There’s a few hundred thousand German POWs on that march. Pretty sure a public affairs soldat could’ve kept his camera. And who knows the facilities at the Gulags? Best way to debunk is to locate that soldat in the historical record.

The footage is more convincing than the story of where it came from. As for the accompanying “awe-inspiring” music, shouldn’t they slow the music down along with the footage?

All sarcasm aside, its body and hair move more naturally than the animated mammoths in the “Cloning the Wooly Mammoth” TV documentary. Let’s hope it’s real. Somebody want to finance an expedition? It might be cheaper than trying to clone one.

I don’t see anything that I definitively a mammoth. It could be a regular elephant in snow. They could have turned a genuine film to black and white and grainy to get this. It does look hairy, but the definition isn’t great and could be misleading.

This is a clip from the 2001 BBC special, “‘Walking With Prehistoric Beasts – Mammoth Journey”. The clip has been cropped, reversed, bleached and “aged” to appear like old footage. Nice try but, some of us are awake and actually remember what we’ve seen in media.

Sorry looks like it was a motion captured and they digitally over laid a skin over a cow in a snow storm…
POW with a motion picture camera is some thing weird specially with the reported brutality Russians treated pows… a camera traded for food would be the reality almost.

The camera could have belonged to the Soviet guards, who might have given it to him to record the mammoth, since they might have known he was a professional photographer. Prisoners of war were often ordered to perform some task in line with their profession. As fo r the tape, well, I’ve been very sceptical about 99% of what we’ve seen on this blog. But this looks real to me, a real animal.

I invoke Betteridge’s Law: If there’s a question mark in the headline, the answer is almost certainly “No.”

The YouTube channel is kinda interesting. A ton of obvious hoax video, attributed to Wikileaks or Putin or other “ripped from the headlines” sources. I guess they hope people won’t look at them all in context, so individual ones can go viral. A sad job, but I fear not an unprofitable one.

If you read the description of this video by the uploader, to be found right beneath the video, you’ll read the following: “Friends, most content shown is either manufactured or altered or exaggerated. Yes, this is essentially an entertainment and comedy channel — and we sincerely hope you appreciate that and enjoy the experience!
(In case anyone is offended, let me assure you that 105.72% of all videos in this particular genre are either beat-ups, hoaxes or fakes. We’re simply being honest, and should probably be applauded, or, at the very least, subscribed to. Many thanks again!)”

I repeat…This is a clip from the 2001 BBC Special “Walking With Prehistoric Beasts – Mammoth Journey”. It has been cropped, flipped and digitally aged. Go to You Tube and watch the “Mammoth Journey” segment and you will see the clip in original form at around 19.00 minutes. Stop speculating folks, it’s getting silly.

I tip my hat to those who actually have the knowledge to post images and video uploads on this site. I knew I had seen that mammoth image before and whoever did this didn’t take out one of the other mammoth’s feet visible in the upper area of the cropped clip…I won’t comment on the Nazi/Soviet background canard but seriously folks, do any of you really think that could be allowed to happen during a death march in WWII? The captured foot soldiers of any army were lucky to shoes on their feet back then no less cine cameras.

Redneckcelt: You should refer to SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET, by Heinrich Harrar, a German who escaped a Siberian prison camp and spent several years fleeing to Tibet, where he met the 13th Dalai Lama. It was made into a movie with Brad Pitt in the lead role. He took movies of Tibetans ice-skating on skates he somehow had delivered to him. I didn’t read the book, so I don’t know how he got his hands on a movie camera. Perhaps he ordered that, as well….

Great catch by cryptokellie. This further proves the degree to which any evidence will have to go through to be proved legitimate. Almost always resulting in it being fake which is too bad. That in my opinion is exactly the same footage just altered.

Goodfoot…It is the same footage, merely flipped, cropped and digitally aged. View the original BBC footage above with a mirror. They are the same CGI images, Check points are the tail movement and the tall branches that the mammoth passes by. Same length of clip at normal speed as well, discounting the fade in and out of the “Nazi” footage edit.
Time to move on.

I don’t know if a a mammoth was alive in 1943, but, I will say that the camera thing is not strange to me, as my father was a holocaust survivor, who was rescued by Russian troops, and he told me that the Nazi’s and the Russians documented everything, and made the prisoners do most of the documenting when it involved cameras and filming. He said the cameras back then were bulky, and they would have the prisoners do the filming so that guards would not have to give up their weapons. He said many of the films you see from inside the concentration camps were shot by prisoners being instructed at gun point by guards. In short, the camera was not owned by the prisoner, it was his captures. Films were later used in war crimes trials to prove or disprove locations.

Watch the video in OrlokSubedei’s terrific post – ten replies back. The clip appears at 19:06 to 19:12 and is in the lower portion of the frame at front. Remember that the copied clip has been cropped, flipped (reversed) and runs from right to left and degraded to appear as old footage might look.
Thanks again to OrlokSubedei for that excellent reply.

the way the camera sets the frame twice shows this to be cgi.
all you have to do is show this to someone who works with cgi and they can tell you that someone was working on a shot, then reset the screen for an unpredicted movement, finished that shot and then did it again. a hand held or tripod set film camera just could not be that smooth, nor could the camera man ”’predict” that the mammoth would just off in that direction, twice. not only that but there is just too much wind on the hair, beating the viewer over the head with the fact; ”hey look at what I did! see the hair!!! its waving in the wind!!”
another thing, if this 15 foot tall mammoth was 75 to 120 feet away from the camera, why weren’t people panicking or running into the shot to establish size? and how did they sneak up on this shy beast, in the frozen bare wastes? sorry, good job on the cgi, but its not authentic film. another overdone russkie fraud.

I forgot to mention the lack of any flaws on the film. no hairs, spots, frozen parts that would make blobs, no jumping of the camera spinning the film itself inside the mechanism. sorry again, maybe german and not russkie, and this chick who is the granddaughter or whatever , would be world famous and in national geographic, the presentation of the cgi mammoth is fraudulent in itself. why would she want to be secret, if she had the worlds most valuable scientific film of a living mammoth?
this would have been presented thru a professor or a university if it wasn’t a deliberate fraud. even if she wanted to remain secret, someone would have wanted to be world famous for this miraculous find.